


A Grey Mist on the Sea’s Face, and a Grey Dawn Breaking

by Kainosite



Category: Enemy at the Door (TV)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-17
Updated: 2020-12-17
Packaged: 2021-03-11 01:34:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28137009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kainosite/pseuds/Kainosite
Summary: After Liberation, Philip Martel embarks on a quest to liberate a prisoner on Herm.
Relationships: Philip Martel/Dieter Richter
Kudos: 7
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	A Grey Mist on the Sea’s Face, and a Grey Dawn Breaking

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Kate_Wisdom](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kate_Wisdom/gifts).



> Content warning for Nazis and non-graphic depiction of war crimes.

Liberation, it seemed to Philip, ought to mean the people of Guernsey had the right to do as they damn well pleased for the first time in nearly five years. Instead they seemed to have exchanged their German army of occupation for an English one. 

It was all very well if one wanted to dance madly through the streets to the sound of a thousand radios that had suddenly emerged from under floorboards or inside flowerpots, or mob the Tommies and beg them for sweets and autographs, or partake in the unheard-of luxury of a proper dinner that included both meat _and_ a vegetable. Their new occupiers were indulgent enough when it came to all that. And to be fair, Philip had done those things too – at least, he’d danced Olive through the streets for five minutes or so before she grew conscious of his dignity as a member of the Controlling Committee and made him stop, and he’d eaten several very good dinners. He might even have thrown dignity to the wind and begged the soldiers for an orange, it had been so long since he’d tasted one, but the only Tommy he wanted to hug was Clive, and Clive was still in Germany.

But what Philip wanted to do now was to hire a boat and take it to Herm, and that, it seemed, was forbidden. The Germans had permitted fishing under a set of absurdly stringent restrictions: only married men with families on the island allowed a fishing license, no fishing in fog or rough weather, no going more than a mile offshore without a German escort. And what little the fishermen could catch under those conditions went to feed the Germans; by the end of the war they were confiscating sixty percent of everything they brought in. But at least boats could leave the harbor. Now they weren’t letting anyone go out at all.

A nice lad named Bill, who came from Birmingham, was explaining this patiently but very firmly to Philip for the fourth or fifth time. Bill was only a corporal and Philip knew perfectly well that it hadn’t been his decision and he had no power change it, but the situation was outrageous and Philip needed to complain about it to someone. He had already tried to complain about it to Bill's superior Colonel Duncan, the new garrison commander on the island, who had told him curtly that they needed the docks for unloading food supplies and offloading German POWs, and the army was extremely busy right now, thank you very much, perhaps they could revisit this question in a month’s time. 

Then Philip had complained about it to John Ambrose, who had pointed out that nobody actually wanted to take a boat out at the moment, because the islanders were much too busy joining in the week-long party that had followed Liberation, or raiding the abandoned German billets and fortifications and supply depots for their stolen furniture or cars or the essential supplies they’d done without for five long years. And given the levels of intoxication prevalent among those who’d managed to stumble on one of the Germans’ liquor stockpiles, it was probably better not to have people messing about in the harbor. No doubt this was all quite true, but Philip was sober and Philip needed a boat and he was quite sure there was someone on the island who would be willing to take him out if he paid them enough, if only the army would allow it.

He’d been reduced to complaining to Olive, who had put up with it for two hours that morning and then kicked him out of the house. So now he was back at the entrance to the harbor, and poor Bill was getting another earful.

“I reckon your trouble is that you’re trying to sail out of Saint Peter Port,” someone said behind him in Guernésiais, interrupting Philip's tirade.

Philip looked over his shoulder and found a stocky, saturnine man in a tattered blue peacoat, holding a cigarette and watching the Tommies swarming around the docks with a slightly sardonic air. He was a fisherman named Jim Lihou, and Philip knew him vaguely from an incident that had happened during the Occupation.

Lihou lived up at L’Islet, well outside the range of Philip’s usual practice, but ever since Philip came back from Cherche-Midi complete strangers had been coming up to him and telling him about things they’d done or were planning to do to defy the Germans, as if they thought he was the leader of some kind of resistance network. Sturmbannführer Reinicke had once compared him to a pigeon, and that was about as intelligent and intentional as Philip had been about the scheme that landed him prison, but at a time when anyone could be an informer his six-month sentence marked him out as trustworthy. And he _was_ trustworthy, as far as it went – at least, he wouldn’t report anyone to the Germans, although he spent more time trying to talk people out of resistance activities than encouraging them.

Philip was friendly with the Porteouses and some others who would shelter fugitives or who had access to food supplies beyond the official rations, so perhaps people weren’t altogether wrong to think he was part of a clandestine network, albeit a very informal, ad hoc, island sort of network. Guernsey didn’t have the numbers or the political organization to sustain anything more. And of course Philip was a doctor, so when someone got clipped by a machine gun trying to raid the German food stores or a family took some desperately ill slave worker into their home, they came to him.

Lihou lived in a little two room cottage that didn’t have space enough to hide a stray cat, much less a human being. All the same, he had sheltered a runaway Todt worker he’d found hiding under his boat, a Russian lad who couldn’t have been much older than Clive. Philip had come to examine him, and when he had to regretfully report that the boy was too far gone from starvation and TB to be helped by any care they could give him, Lihou had said,

“Well, he can stop here, then, and die in a bed.”

He had given the boy his own bed, and was sleeping on a green-bed in the kitchen. He wouldn’t be dissuaded even when Philip gently tried to point out that tuberculosis was an infectious disease and he was putting himself at risk, even apart from the danger that the Germans might search the house and find him harboring a fugitive and send him off to a concentration camp.

When the boy died a few days later, Philip had driven up to L’Islet that night after curfew, and they’d put the body in the backseat of his car and driven it over to the graveyard of the Vale Church and laid it out between the headstones. It would have been a hard thing to manage normally between just the two of them, for they were neither of them young men and they were suffering from malnutrition themselves by that time, but that poor starved Russian weighed no more than a child. He’d looked quite peaceful lying there in the moonlight in the soft grass, before the Germans found the body and took it away and dumped it in a lye pit or whatever it was they did with them.

That was the one and only time Philip had ever had any dealings with Jim Lihou, but disposing of a body together in the dead of night beneath the nose of an occupying army was the sort of activity that forged a lasting bond.

“Oh, yes?” he said to Lihou, in Guernésiais.

“They’re not manning the coastal defenses, they’ve just got that lad there stopping anyone going out of the harbor,” Lihou said, nodding at Bill from Birmingham, who was trying to look like he didn’t feel wounded they'd chosen to have an unintelligible conversation right in front of him. Philip was still piqued enough by the unnecessary restrictions to take a vindictive pleasure in it.

“I reckon if you put out from anywhere else, you’d be all right,” Lihou said, stubbing out his cigarette on the harbor wall.

“You might be right.”

“I have a boat,” Lihou remarked.

That sounded suspiciously like an offer. Philip looked over at him sharply, and Lihou gave a slight nod.

“Shall we take this conversation somewhere else?” Philip asked. He could understand just about anything said to him in Guernésiais, but he wasn’t sure he had the vocabulary to explain why he needed the boat. Besides, they’d teased poor Bill enough.

Lihou had no objections, and they walked along the seawall until they came to a place where they could be sure they wouldn’t be overheard.

“I remember your boat,” Philip said, switching back to English. “It was hauled out behind your cottage.”

“I took the motor off her so the Jerries wouldn’t give me any trouble, but I’ve been looking after the hull. She’s still seaworthy. Just no point having her in the water if I couldn’t take her out, and I couldn’t. Fished all my life from twelve years old, but those Jerry bastards wouldn’t grant me a license.” Lihou laughed bitterly. “There’s ten years my wife’s been dead, see – no wife, no license. Named the boat after her, but that wasn’t good enough for them.”

“But you could put the motor back on?” Philip asked.

“Already have. First thing I did when I heard we’d been liberated.”

“And you can get her back in the water?”

Lihou laughed again. “Oh, that’s easy enough. The Corbets over in the Vale spent the war black marketeering like mad and everyone knows it; they’re desperate not to be reported to that inquiry the English are holding. They’ll do anyone a favor if they think it'll keep them quiet.”

“Look, Jim, I think before this goes any further I’d better tell you what I want a boat for,” Philip said. “I want to go over to Herm and find the German officer who was Kommandant here until April.”

Lihou studied him with shrewd black eyes. “What for?”

“That mad admiral of theirs banished him there; a sort of Devil’s Island, I suppose. They wouldn’t tell me quite what Richter did, but I expect it will have been for saying the Occupation shouldn’t go on into next year, or something reasonable like that. I'm sure our chaps will go pick him up eventually, but they’re taking their time about it. And they were on starvation rations, the Germans; I can’t imagine they left him much when they marooned him. I don’t think it’s right just to let him languish there when someone could nip across the Little Roussel and retrieve him in half an hour. I want to go there and bring him back to Guernsey.”

“Thought you were going to say you wanted to go over there and shoot him,” Lihou said.

“No. Not that I can say I’ve never been tempted.” Philip laughed ruefully and shook his head. “But he did his best for us, more or less. I feel I owe it to him.”

Lihou looked at him, and Philip knew exactly what he was thinking, because the same thoughts had run through his own head on a hundred sleepless nights: that Richter’s best hadn’t amounted to very much, that whatever the Wehrmacht might claim about the independent jurisdiction of the Organisation Todt, Richter had been Kommandant of Guernsey, and everything that happened on the island could ultimately be laid at his door, including starving Russian prisoners of war people found hiding under their boats. And that perhaps such a man deserved to go hungry.

“You really care for this German, don’t you?” Lihou said his face unreadable. Perhaps it was impossible after all to know what he was thinking.

“He saved my life,” Philip said simply.

That was true, but the reality was it explained nothing of what he felt for Dieter Richter. The electricity between them had been sparked long before Clare put that fateful letter in his luggage. It had started that first time Richter came to the Martels' house, maybe, when he told them he knew that it was Peter Porteous who had tried to escape the first night of the Occupation, and that Clare had helped him, and he’d come to ask Philip to discourage others from doing the same. And then he told Olive about Trumpington Street in Cambridge, where there were cherry trees all along.

It had been very strange to come home to find the German Kommandant in his drawing room, sitting in an armchair in his pressed grey uniform – though he wasn’t sitting in it for long, because he leapt to his feet politely the moment Philip came in. That visit had been such a peculiar mix of conciliation and threat that Philip didn’t know what to make of it. Richter was a puzzle, and Philip had promptly set himself to solving it, but five years on he felt no closer than he had that first summer. How could such an intelligent, humane man devote himself so wholeheartedly to serving something so monstrous?

Philip had thought, when he first came back from France, that it was mere ignorance, that Richter simply did not understand the true nature of the regime he served. He’d clung to that belief in his prison cell: if Richter knew the horrors of a place like Cherche-Midi, he could never have sent Philip there, could never have sent anyone there. If only he could be made to see, he would no longer be able to countenance his complicity in his government’s crimes. Surely he would have to defect or resist or fight back somehow, surely something would change. But Philip had come back to Guernsey with his own eyes opened, and the hope he’d nursed through six hellish months in a French prison couldn’t survive a clear-eyed look at the island the Kommandant ruled.

If Richter was ignorant, it was an ignorance as carefully cultivated and warmed and watered as the vegetables in a Guernsey glasshouse. And whenever some gust of wind blew in to chill those tender fronds – a handful of Jews deported to some hideous fate, a Todt worker beaten to death on the streets of Saint Peter Port or a hundred of them dead on Alderney, Philip staggering into the Kommandantur office filthy and reeking from his time in prison – Richter was as quick as any tomato grower to slam the door shut again and keep out the cold. “A civilized, cultured man acting as a façade for barbarism,” Cecily Brown had called him, just a few days after the Germans had landed on the island. Philip hadn’t wanted to believe her then, but she had seen clearly what he could not.

And perhaps Philip was no better than Richter when it came to forgiving the unforgivable, to carefully averting his gaze and carrying on as if nothing was wrong. Because despite it all, despite everything he knew and everything he'd seen, he still loved the man. That’s what it was, that flutter in his chest when Richter smiled at him, that sense of invigoration when he walked into the Kommandant’s office, the way he spent dull moments picturing Richter's face and daydreaming about what they might say to each other when next they met. He’d felt it for Olive once, before the fires of passion were banked into the warm, comfortable glow of a marriage and a household and two small children. He’d felt it for other girls, in the bygone days of youth. Philip knew.

Maybe he could never act on it, with laws and wives and the war in the way. Maybe he _should_ never act on it, with everything that Richter was. But he refused to lie about it, not to himself. At least one of them ought to be honest about what he was doing.

Lying to Jim Lihou about it was just common decency, though. Philip might be stuck with this bitter, conflicted tangle in his heart, but there was no reason why anyone else should have to put up with it. “He saved my life” was a nice, clear motive that people could understand.

Lihou frowned, and then looked up, resolute.

“Any other member of the Controlling Committee, I’d tell him where to get off, but I’ll do it for you, Dr. Martel. If you can get me some petrol, I’ll get you to Herm.”


End file.
